Thomas T. Liao
Program in Technology and Society
State University of New York at Stonybrook

Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of
the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center or the National Research
Council. The paper has not been reviewed by the National Research Council.

To reflect on ones professional career is at best a daunting exercise.
In my case, the task is simplified because of one common trend:
involvement in NSF sponsored projects. In the past thirty-four years,
I have had the good fortune of being directly involved in NSF
sponsored curriculum development and teacher enhancement
projects for thirty of those years.

In the Fall of 1957, I was a freshman at Brooklyn College, majoring
in Physics. Thus, my high school Physics courses were not influenced
by the post Sputnik educational reform efforts. In one sense, this may
have been a blessing because if I had taken the PSSC [Physical
Science Study Committee] Physics course at Stuyvesant High
School, I may not have become a Physics major. The reasons for
this comment will become more evident when I discuss my
experiences as a teacher of the PSSC Physics course.

My professional career as a science teacher was first affected by
NSF sponsored projects in 1963 when I attended a summer institute
in Physics that was part of an NSF funded three-year program that
resulted in a Masters Degree. The next year I was assigned to teach
the newly developed PSSC Physics course at Brooklyn Technical
High School. Since 1963, except for a few short time periods
between projects, I have benefitted from involvement both as a
participant and staff of NSF sponsored projects.

This paper will provide a personal account of my journey from being
a teacher of the PSSC Physics course in 1964 to my current role as
a Co-PI of a NSF supported teacher enhancement project designed
to help elementary teachers to integrate the study of Mathematics,
Science, and Technology [MSTe]. Each of the past four decades has
provided unique educational reform challenges. I will reflect on the
challenges from the perspective of the important lessons learned that
can be used to guide todays reform efforts. I will also reflect on the
value of NSF sponsored projects in the professional development of
young teachers.

Preparing and teaching the PSSC course helped me to develop a
much deeper understanding of the processes and major concepts of
Physics. However, only the future scientists in my PSSC class found
the course to be interesting and meaningful. Most of the students,
even at a magnet high school such as Brooklyn Technical High
School needed to study Physics in which concepts are learned in the
context of real world examples and in a learning environment that
provides opportunities for student construction of their own
understandings.

The PSSC course lacked both of the above curriculum and
instruction features. Thus, if I had taken the course as a student at
Stuyvesant High School, I might not have elected to be a Physics
major. My encounter with Physics and Electronics courses in the mid
1950s was filled with real world applications. In fact my Physics
teacher, Dr. Myers worked part-time at Bell Labs and often
discussed the applications of the Physics concepts that we were
studying.

Given my early interest in applied Physics, I probably would have
majored in Engineering except for the positive experiences that I had
in my high school Physics classes. My opportunity to study
Engineering finally occurred at the end of the first decade. The
watershed year of my teaching career was 1966, when I was invited
to be a pilot teacher for the new ECCP [Engineering Concepts
Curriculum Project] course that was entitled The Man-Made
World[TMMW]. During the Spring of 1966, I had a very difficult
decision about how best to develop myself professionally. Besides
the ECCP invitation to attend a six-week summer institute in
Boulder, Colorado, I also had invitations to attend two other NSF
sponsored summer workshops. The deciding factor was the
opportunity to learn about the emerging information technologies and
to teach a new course dealing with engineering concepts.